To succeed you need to have endurance. Too many times we give up when the going gets tough. It feels like the luscious rolling fields of green grass where you lay on your back gazing up at the blue sky with daisy chains in your hair dry up and turn into a dusty desert. No life anywhere to be seen and you here a voice shouting at you "Pick yourself up and get moving!" Maybe for a while it felt nice to play in the sand but nothing worthwhile is going to grow in the desert. Or does it? If you can sit in the dry places where nothing is going for you and find strength to move on, winds coming against you and yet you find it in yourself to find a song and sing it… you've grown endurance. Endurance or long-suffering is a fruit of the spirit.. it's not a gift, it's a fruit. Therefore it has to be grown. So, if you feel life is unfair at the moment and you've had your peace stripped away remember, life is meant to produce fruit. You're not going to be in the desert forever. Just as long as it takes to grow the biggest, ripest piece of fruit you can offer.
The fruit of endurance comes somewhere in the middle of love and self control. For instance, I love God. Sometimes I feel like he's so close to me that I'm sitting inside of him. Other times I feel like I'm sitting in the desert and he's nowhere to be seen. It's those times that God recalls the most, because its then that I find endurance and through self control I pass off the temptation to wander my own way and I choose to draw near to him anyway.
My daughter Summer loves to dance so I enrolled her in ballet/hiphop lessons. She did it for a term and realised it was hard work and boring and was going to take years before she would be flying through the air twirling and spinning like the professionals. She dropped out. No fruit there yet! I hope she does find a passion thats she's willing to endure through the learning of, to then be granted the satisfaction of success. You have to love something/someone enough to endure the tests and trials and through determination and self control great fruit is produced!
I encourage you to persevere with the things/people you love, because when you find something you're passionate about there will always be challenging times. You may not receive your favoured outcome today or tomorrow but when you find success through endurance it will all be worth it.
